Sustainability of mineral resources

Demand for mineral raw materials continues to grow, driven by demographics and changing lifestyles, generating increasing trade. Production is widely diversified in terms of both quantity and value, but with a steady decline in resource quality, a renewal of players, environmental impacts and unequal sharing of resources between countries. Initiatives such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) aim to combat the uncontrolled exploitation of mining resources, which results in unacceptable social and environmental situations. Even if mineral resource depletion is not a parameter that can be simply defined, mineral depletion and processing costs can have an impact on the economic side of the equation. While the price of the source term can only increase in the processing chain, the ultimate limitation on the use of mineral resources will come from other parameters: energy costs, access to water, environmental constraints..